National Health Technology Standards Corporation

["Anders Rundgren" <anders.rundgren@telia.com>]

http://news.com.com/High-tech+alliance+for+digital+health+network/2100-1028_3-5550628.html?tag=nefd.top

If this is for real, it could have a rather profound effect on (F)PKI, as it
seems that they are trying to create "a scalable and secure architecture for
information exchange and collaboration" (my wording)..

If this consortium succeeds in creating a working architecture for healthcare,
they have "fixed the rest as well" as it seems that healthcare comprises
practically all security, privacy and legal issues one could imagine.

This is likely to be yet another blow at the already severely marginalized
S/MIME scheme, as the network with a high certainty will be based on Web
Services, and due to that also feature a "Gateway PKI".

Gateways will be the norm for most org-to-org communication including
cross-border dittos as can be seen by this document:
http://europa.eu.int/idabc/en/document/3760

Although gateways are well-known by security people, something went terribly
wrong when this extremely time-proven concept met with PKI. I guess this must
have had something to do with the idea that PKI's sole mission in life is
providing legally binding signatures for individuals.  But this is actually
only one out of a myriad of PKI applications.

Now to a yet not solved question: What exactly is a gateway certificate?

Anders Rundgren